Executive Summary

Mobility-assisted networking is becoming very popular as a mean of delivering messages in disconnected or very dynamic networks, such as opportunistic networks. Despite the rapid growth in the number of proposals for routing protocols that exploit the mobility of nodes, there is a lack of general theoretical frameworks to be used for studying analytically their performance under different mobility conditions (e.g., exponential or Pareto inter-meeting times). Moreover, one of the main approaches to forwarding (so-called utility-based forwarding) consists in nodes collecting statistics about their behavior (e.g., their contact patterns), and using this information to guide the forwarding process.